Transport for London censors anagram Tube map (bb link, and more anagrams). One would have thought that TFL would have wised up to the cult status of the map by now and understood that the publicity gained by the distribution of such 'remixes' more than outweighs any potential copyright infringements.

No-one quite knows why the tube map has such a cult following. Geofftech helpfully collects all the map variations on one page, copyright be damned. Half of the user remixes are just that, reappropriating the diagram with new or altered information, be it musical, corporations, etc., all following in the spirit of artist Simon Patterson'sThe Great Bear (which has turned out to be one of the most influential artworks of the past decade). But there are plenty of 'hacks' that add another of information, geographical, technological, etc. Perhaps this is what riles TFL's information designers, who have been on an orgy of map-making in recent years.

There's a piece in the latest issue of Wired about fanatical lego fans and their contribution to reinventing a product that seems hopelessly mired in expensive license deals (Batman, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.) and products that are becoming more and more prescriptive in the ways they can be built. Then came Mindstorms, a kind of budget robotic kit of surprisingly complexity that has spurned a vast community of hackers, creating a 'culture of innovation' that Lego are now using to develop new products. Lego has a seriously devoted following (see Lugnet, amongst others), but is it to much of a stretch to expect transportation companies, for example, to tap into the enthusiasm of people who not only use their product on a regular basis, but also have the know-how to improve it?

Functional Fate has a thing about the humble white plastic chair, which crops up just about everywhere. Our contribution: this amazing 80s penthouse in St James (on sale via Foxtons for a shade under £5m). It seems that however much money you have, Astroturf and white plastic chairs are still a winning combination / from the ridiculous to the sublime: some rather elegant treehouses (via tmn). See also architectural practice The AOC and their 'Folly for a Filmmaker'. You could also try hanging a Free Spirit Sphere, although you'll need access to some fairly hefty trees.

'In John They Trust', an article in the Smithsonian Magazine about the modern day 'John Frum' cargo cult (via Boing Boing). The accelerated rate of Western consumption, specifically military consumption, has created an extraordinarily skewed world view: 'At war's end, the U.S. military unwittingly enhanced the legend of their endless supply of cargo when they bulldozed tons of equipment - trucks, jeeps, aircraft engines, supplies - off the coast of Espiritu Santo. During six decades in the shallows, coral and sand have obscured much of the watery grave of war surplus, but snorkelers can still see tires, bulldozers and even full Coke bottles. The locals wryly named the place Million Dollar Point.'

That last link goes to a Cabinet Magazine article on the spot and Operation Roll-Up, the post-war 'clean up' program that was to provide a bizarre military-industrial-tropical aesthetic in CBS's Survivor Vanuatu. Before you condemn the dumping and destruction as a classic example of wasteful American behaviour, a similar post-war operation in the Solomon Islands was ruthlessly overseen by the British colonial government: 'Islanders held the British colonial government, not the American military, accountable for this destruction.'

Above all, the creation of Million Dollar Point unwittingly accelerated the growth of the cargo cult, a concept that pre-dated the military take-over of the South Pacific region in WW2 but which blossomed under the enormous financial investment into the area. The objects the US military imported have since become the focus of the islanders' veneration: 'In the same vein, all kinds of material objects and symbols of the American presence - from red wood crosses modeled on the Red Cross to marine hats - were adopted as religious paraphernalia, invested with meaning that seemed strangely independent of, yet intimately connected to, their original purposes.'

Whatever happened to screensavers? Are we all doing so much more work that we have no time for them? A few years back there was a brief trend for screensavers that beavered away at giant datasets, networked computing projects like SETI at home (and other BOINC-powered projects (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). The BBC are now collaborating with the Climate Prediction website. More information here, along with a map of current users.

Apologies for the recent radio silence. That's what happens when you forget to renew your domain name. To make up for it, here's a very random collection, much of which will be familiar to the more regular link weblog browsers among you.

In the 1940s, two French anthropologists delved into Dogon mythology, and were told that the Nommo 'were inhabitants of a world circling the star Sirius', a world unfamiliar to astronomers of the day, before eventually Sirius B was discovered in 1970. This was the stuff of schlocky paperback publishers' dreams and in 1977 a book called The Sirius Mystery duly appeared (and is still available), claiming that Dogon astronomical knowledge had been handed down by none other than aliens themselves, and that there were striking parallels between alleged Nommo history and early Christian history. UFOlogists love this stuff, almost as much as sceptics like to debunk it (with James Oberg being prominent in the latter camp).

The 'ancient astronaut' argument is now so retro is has the same vintage hue as brown carpets or textured wallpaper. That famous hack and theme park ownerErich von Daniken has built a career on misinterpeting such things in a series of lurid books and while we'd love to visit Mystery Park as much as the next person, the main lesson that can be gleaned from the 'controversy' is that ideas and knowledge has always enjoyed swift cross-cultural transference. Even in the inter-war period, information was travelling around the globe and being incorporated into oral histories far faster than any anthropologist could track.

Adam Nicholson on Dubai, an economic powerhouse that is funding an architectural zoo: 'More than seven million containers are moved here in the course of the year, a figure that grew 23% last year, and is set to triple within the next six years, serving a market of two billion people.' / Yemen, 'architecture and landscapes' / trees taking over, a temple in Angkor, Cambodia / recent Saab posters. Interesting how the company should try to spin out a Bauhaus association for the Australian market, because in Europe that particular assocation is pretty much owned by Audi (thanks to some cunning marketing). Although any such link is rather disingenuous at best, word has it that the next few generations of German cars will increasingly hark back to the pronounced wheelarches and prominent radiator styling of pre-war cars. You can see this emerging, as if from a cultural chrysalis.

We've abandoned our daily photograph for a bit while the image banks are re-stocked. For the next few weeks, all thumbnails at right will come from our extensive projects archive. We'll kick off with Bulldozing Belgium, a collection of photographs by Kevin Saidler.

Apologies to Jennifer at Architecture magazine - our reply bounced back. But in answer to your question, we're really, really hoping to have a print issue ready for some time in the summer. 'things' tends to be put out when it's ready, and schedules are very adhoc. There's a (very intermittent) mailing list for updates.

Alice Rawsthorne is to leave the Design Museum, which in turn might leave its original site. Meanwhile, the museum's status as the keeper of the Modernist flame (capital 'M') is very much under threat. The V&A's new exhibition on Modernism is an attempt to to rehabilitate modernism's idealism and contemporary validity. Perhaps this will result in a more fluid, flexible history, rather than the Design Museum's increasingly archaic study collection. In the Observer, Deyan Sudjic describes Modernism as 'the idea that just won't go away,' citing Britain's 'illogical' but relentless simultaneous pursuit of nostaglia and technology. Architecture rarely benefits from such schizophrenic tastes.

Check the series on Strip Coal Mining in Eastern Kentucky. The new industrialisation is all around us, on a mammoth scale, yet it seems that only fine art photographers are taking any notice. The rest of us just sleepwalk while our worlds are created in the vast yet unseen backrooms and workshops on the other side of the world, strangelandscapes that will ultimately, inevitably, impact upon us all.

Manchester's oldest building, the Wellington Inn, is also one of the most-travelled buildings in England, shifted around the city centre not once but twice. W.Randolf Hearst used to buy whole buildings, ship them out to the States and then promptly forget about them. At one point he owned a crated-up European monastery on both coasts of the USA: 'Santa Maria de Ovila was a classic white elephant. It took up 28,000 square feet of warehouse and was totally useless.' A few of the stones have been given a New Age lease of life in San Francisco, while others languish in Golden Gate Park.

Charts, diagrams, information graphics by Karl Hartig, via Sachs. Karl also has a thing for Geodesic Domes, once the architectural symbol of the world of tomorrow, when encasing the world seemed like the best option. That last image came from Fabio Femino's vast SF archive, chaotically organised by stuffed full of imagery by the likes of Chesley Bonestell and Robert McCall. There are links to other like-minded artists and collectors, including artist Frank Wu's gallery of the work of Frank R. Paul, who worked between the wars. 'FRP's style shows his architectural training; his cities and technology are lovingly detailed, his aliens well thought out and plausible, but his human figures stiff and simplistic.' (if you like this kind of stuff enough to put up a website about it, you're usually into something else that's equally obscure. For example, Mr Wu likes kitsch America).

What happens if you open up comments totally - you become a dedicated comment gardener / a celebrated place for photographers, the Bangladeshi ship-breaking yards. Anyone tracked this place down on Google Earth yet? / the internet has turned us into a world of toy collectors, allowing the endless revisiting of a perfectly-imagined childhood. Example: Hi-Fructose, a 'toysploitation' magazine devoted to adult collectables / Edmund Rumpler's streamlined Tropfenwagen, a 1920s take on the new science of aerodynamics. The packaging is especially neat.